In the year of 2003, in the setting of Iraq, we meet
Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller (Matt Damon) who just
wants to do his job. This job is leading his crew to the
sights given to him and finding Weapons of Mass
Destruction and disabling them. When we catch up with
Chief Miller he has risked his life, the life of his
men, in addition to the lives of his colleagues to
uncover yet another abandoned toilet factory. Chief
Miller has had enough of this nonsense and need answers
and thus director Paul Greengrass’ fictional depiction
of the launch of the war in Iraq, ‘Green Zone’, has its
basis for its tale as it picks little pieces of truth
here and there to tell a story that ends up being a very
entertaining action thriller.

It is clear to Chief Miller that the intelligence he’s
been given is not just faulty but flat incorrect and he
needs to know where this intel is coming from. His
superiors inform Miller, and correctly I might add, that
his job is to execute orders and not question the
origins of these orders, so its off to another site to
dig holes searching for WMD’s which look like they might
not actually exist. Then Chief Miller gets a visit from
a concerned Iraqi national who calls himself Freddy
(Khalid Abdalla), who informs him that some big meeting
is going on and that some of the major players that the
Multi-National Forces are searching for, could very well
be at this location. Even though these are not his
orders, off Chief Miller goes to see what the dealio is.

Sure enough at this location is General Alwari (Yigal
Naor), the Jack of Clubs, and Miller and crew were this
close to bringing him in. But intrigue abounds.
There is a reporter (Amy Ryan) who broke the story on
the WMD’s based on critical info from high ranking
government official Clark Poundstone (Greg Kinnear). The
reporter just wants to meet the secret government
informant known as ‘Magellan’ to support her reporting
but Magellan is always unavailable. There’s also this
CIA dude (Brendan Gleeson) who is at odds with
Poundstone over his methods and thinks something is
definitely wrong with the WMD scenario, but is getting
no answers in addition to getting cop blocked whenever
he searches for these answers.

The reporter knows something is wrong, the CIA cat
knows something is wrong and once Miller gets his ass
kicked by one of those Black Water type goons (Jason
Isaac) for not giving him something he pulled off one of
those guys during their impromptu raid, he knows
something is clearly wrong and now it’s time to uncover
the truth and blow the lid off this sucker. History will
tell us that the lid will eventually be blown off this
sucker but it will matter very little because what’s
done is done.

I enjoyed ‘Green Zone’ as a form of motion picture
entertainment. If you take the story this film tells as
a work of fiction, the fact that it pulls out what we
know as truth today, that being that WMD's do not exist,
and then works backwards from there to construct a
narrative to create some support for this well known
truth, I think most will be okay with the way that this
story is told. Matt Damon was very good in this movie,
considering this is kind of what the actor does now and
as such he has this thing down pretty good and there’s
plenty of action to go along with our revised historical
intrigue.

But despite the fact I enjoyed watching this movie you
are required to set a lot of things aside. For instance
Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller is like the worst
soldier ever. To call Warrant Officer Miller
insubordinate is being kind. If command tells you to
keep quiet, you keep quiet. If command tells you to dig
holes, you dig holes. If some random guy tells you
Saddam Hussein is down the street while you’re in the
middle of executing a command, you call it in. If
command tells you to blow up an elementary school full
of kids, then you are morally obligated to question
command while fully aware that you face court martial
for doing so. But this soldier’s behavior was treated as
completely acceptable with no real ramifications. There
was a point in this movie where Miller was actually
choosing whose orders to follow. Worst. Solider. Ever.

Once you accept the complete disregard for the Chain of
Command, then you have to buy into the fact, as it is
given to us in this movie, that one single person is
behind the WMD fiasco and the decision to go to war. In
my idealistic world that I still maintain some naiveté,
I would like to believe that this is impossible.

Then there’s Paul Greengrass and his ‘shaky camera’. He
gets a lot of grief for his Shaky Camera and while I had
no problem with it in this movie for his daytime action
scenes but in his final tour de force nighttime action
shoot out I had no earthly clue what was going on
visually. Because I was paying attention to the movie I
was able to decipher, with reasonable accuracy, what
theoretically was going on before me, but actually
seeing this and making heads or tails of this was a
challenge.

But all that being said I did enjoy the movie for what
it was, this being a taut action thriller. There are
caveats to this enjoyment, without a doubt, but if you
can get past those, and believe me this isn’t that easy,
then there is entertainment value in the ‘Green Zone’.